I like to think that most people who are upset at Kubernetes don't hate on all of it. I think the configuration aspect (YAML) and the very high level of abstraction is what get people lost and as a result they get frustrated by it. I've certainly fall in that category while trying to learn how to operate multiple clusters using different topologies and cloud providers.

But from an operational standpoint, when things are working, it usually behaves very well until you hit some rough edge cases (upgrades were much harder to achieve a couple of years back). But rough edges exist everywhere, and when I get to a point where K8s hits a problem, I would think that it would be much worse if I wasn't using it.